


The Taste of Desire

by jibrailis



Category: The Sandman
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-06
Updated: 2010-03-06
Packaged: 2017-10-07 18:20:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jibrailis/pseuds/jibrailis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Desire after the death of Dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Taste of Desire

The boat has passed under the water. Death stands in her red dress, watching, and Desire in turn watches her. Its fingers are curled tight around a cigarette, the smoke making plumes like a feather in a hat, and it watches Death unblinking. Stars are born and disappear from the sky. The smoke rises, rises, then stops. Still Desire watches its sister. Still it stays.  
   
There is a mystery even it cannot solve.  
 

* * *

  
 

What does Desire want? Ah, what a question!  
   
It has no use for love-- everyone loves it, everyone worships it. It has no use for jewels or baubles or grand palaces-- the Threshold is large enough to hold entire worlds and what else could compare? It has no use for companionship or joy, those fickle, human things. Desire wants for nothing.  
   
Desire does not want.  
 

* * *

  
 

In the recording studio, they’re singing that song again. Pretty girls with bubble-gum lips and sunflower hair are crooning into a microphone, crooning words of passion they will never feel. Baby, baby, hold me. Their breasts push out of their low-cut tops and their asses are squeezed by hundred-dollar jeans.  
   
Sitting on top of a piano, Desire watches them.  
   
Then it goes to the after parties and there are the girls again, lying on couches with their arms wrapped around boys, smiling, smiling with their oh-so-pink lips. Someone offers them a cigarette. They puff on it. Someone offers them a needle. They shoot up bright fluorescent happiness.  
   
Desire looks at its gallery.  
   
Its brother’s sigil is silent.  
   
“But you always know where to find me,” says Destruction.  
 

* * *

  
 

One of the girls is lying on the curb. Cars rumble by, splashing puddles onto her body but she says “fuck you” and doesn’t get up. She’s still bright, shining, and when a dog comes and sniffs her, she laughs and calls it Barnabas.  
   
“At least I think you’re Barnabas,” Delirium says. “Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re a super-secret agent from outer space. Or an apple in a worm. I had an apple in a worm once. It blew bubbles at me. Yeah.”  
   
Delirium looks up.  
   
“Do you like bubbles?”  
   
Desire smiles.

 

* * *

  
 

“Bubbles,” says Destiny in a solemn tone of voice, but everything Destiny says is solemn anyway, like he’s about to pronounce the end of the world. Perhaps he is. Desire sometimes wonders just what’s in that book Destiny carries. Other times it imagines knowing would be too much of a bore.  
   
“Bubbles,” it says and leans against a hedge in its brother’s garden. “A perfectly innocent question. Do you like bubbles? _He_ always did.”  
   
Destiny ignores it.  
 

* * *

  
 

In its wanderings once, Desire ended up in a kingdom it did not recognize at first. It was a kingdom of dark places and bright lights. It was a kingdom with all the girls in the world and all the boys and pretty flowers and sharp edges. It was a kingdom where ghosts wrapped knives around its neck and a woman in a blue dress came up to it and kissed it on the cheek saying, “Et tu, Brutus?”  
   
Desire does not know why it wandered into the Dreaming. It does not like it here, though some would say Dream and Desire are intimately connected.  
   
Once, once.  
   
Pale limbs and tawny eyes and a word breathed on a sweet-soft breath.  
   
Daniel is standing at the gate, curious.  
   
Desire leaves.  
 

* * *

  
 

“Tell me, what troubles you?” soothes Despair in a scratchy, ugly voice. Desire lies on her lap, head against her oozing, pulsing flesh, and she runs fingers through its hair like a mother or sister or both.  
   
“Nothing troubles me.”  
   
“You lie.”  
   
But Despair does not understand. All Despair knows are the mirrors in her realm and people who cry out her name. She does not know what honey tastes like or what your skin feels when someone else’s mouth is on it. She does not know the tightening of your body right before orgasm or the white-hot pleasure that comes with.  
   
Desire does.  
   
Desire knows better than you do.  
 

* * *

 

That room. That necropolis.

Desire never lets itself finish the thought.

 

* * *

  
 

The boat is gone now.

 

* * *

 

Desire crushes its cigarette beneath its heel and dreams one last dream.


End file.
